[AmericanThinker] I doubt that President Trump has a specific animus toward Harvard. Instead, he understands that Harvard is the most famous academic institution in America. If academia as a whole is behaving badly, and you successfully make an example of Harvard, you’ve won.
In this case, after having witnessed 18 months of America’s campuses lapsing into Nazi-style cesspools of open antisemitism, Donald Trump
 ...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US...
targeted Harvard, and he did so with an old maxim in mind: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Barring a very few colleges (Hillsdale springs to mind), America’s institutions stay afloat thanks to two financial sources: taxpayers (via grants and guaranteed loans) and foreign students.
Neither is a right. The money from taxpayers is contingent on the institutions abiding by the law; the money from foreign students is contingent on the institutions ensuring that the overseas students abide by the law, including laws connected to their visa status. Both are privileges that can be withdrawn.
Across America, when colleges and universities allow physical and verbal attacks on Jewish students, blatantly violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and when they allow foreign students to take a central role in these attacks, they are violating federal law. Through a series of initiatives, Trump has said that (a) taxpayer money will not flow to lawless institutions and (b) these institutions have lost the privilege of sucking up vast wealth from overseas students. (Per Grok’s analysis, more than 25% of Harvard’s current student body consists of overseas students.)
Currently, Harvard and other institutions have found compliant judges holding that the law doesn’t apply to them. In Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,, a judge issued a nationwide injunction holding that Trump cannot terminate the visas of foreign students accused of violating the terms of those visas. In Massachusetts, when Kristi Noem informed Harvard that it’s consistently violating Jewish students’ rights—and its refusal to provide information to DHS about those violations—meant that the government was revoking its privilege of hosting foreign students, Harvard instantly found a judge to stay that mandate.
Leftists, of course, are squealing that Trump is violating Harvard’s "rights." But Harvard’s only right is to offer an education, no matter how bad, to American students willing to pay. The other thing—the federal money and the foreign students—aren’t rights, and the New York Times
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
has figured that out.
Now, the New York Times has problems with its reporting. As we’ve written here (and you can see the details here), the New York Times wrote a story that effectively says that American Thinker lied about a photograph. Despite having had almost 24 hours to correct the story, the Times has not. I expect no more from a leftist outlet that, all of its protests to the contrary, is not a newspaper but is, instead, a propaganda arm of the Democrat party.
But it’s that very fealty to the Democrat party that means the Times is probably correct—and shaking in its shoes—when it writes "Why Harvard Has No Way Out: Even against one of the nation’s oldest institutions, the Trump administration holds the levers of power — and it’s using them aggressively."
The essay, which sees Jess Bidgood interview Michael S. Schmidt, explains that, despite Harvard’s valiant efforts to defend itself (that is, to keep the antisemitism alive), "the administration holds the levers of power, and is methodically and creatively using them in a take-no-prisoners assault on the school."
The real insult is that the White House, in shutting down those oh-so-valuable foreign students, "turned to an obscure tactic it usually uses to shut down shoddy diploma mills." The emphasis, applied smugly, is mine because much of what Harvard does is a shoddy diploma mill, given that many of its students are manifestly indoctrinated and minimally educated.
According to Schmidt, one of the things that Trump’s move against international students did was make Harvard less attractive to those students, while the issue ping-pongs in and out of the courts:
If you’re an international student at Harvard, are you going to be like, "OK, cool, I’ll just go to school in the fall, and I’ll be checking the federal docket to see if the restraining order is still in place"?
Moreover, Schmidt says, Harvard can no longer rely on federal funding, despite judges willing to dive in on its behalf:
Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question? (Emphasis mine.)
With that kind of pressure, says Schmidt, "Harvard officials have privately determined they are in a major, major, major crisis with very few, if any, good off ramps [sic]." The courts can’t save Harvard because Trump has created an unstable situation (there’s that Trump habit of creating leverage) that will see foreign students and research projects going elsewhere.
And here’s the real beauty of that leverage. Harvard, a despicable institution that has fed Marxism in all its forms (economic, racial, antisemitic, sexual, etc.) for decades, in large part thanks to huge influxes of taxpayer dollars, feels it has no options:
Harvard’s board, as far as we know, won’t let the university go back to the table. The board members don’t trust that you can negotiate with Trump. And the things that Trump keeps hitting Harvard with are so destructive. How could you go back to the table?
And because the best dessert always has a cherry on top, Harvard’s vaunted $53.2 billion endowment might not save it. Thanks to a possible inflated valuation driven by illiquid assets and debt, some contend that the real value might be closer to $29 billion.
That’s still a huge pile of money (especially if you get rid of all the leftist "studies" programs to cut costs), but that fact, if true, increases the pressure on Harvard to abide by American law. 
|
